Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
